Reader: Ted Haggard swapped agendas...and mates...with Gary Busey

ABC pulled a swap with the first segment of Celebrity Wife Swap, moving up the episode that had been scheduled for next week to this past Tuesday. And what swap led off the new season? Pastor Ted Haggard traded wives with Gary Busey, sending his mate -- who already deserved hazard pay for weathering the Mike Jones scandal -- to live with the wacky star in Los Angeles.

Early in the show, for example, Gayle Haggard asks Busey: "Do you go to church?"

Replies Busey: "I am a church."

Pew!

Greg smelled something funny about this set-up:

Gayle was just begging Busey to ask her about her past so she could give him her little prerehearsed speech. The Haggards had SUCH an agenda on that show it was ridiculous. "I have to be resurrected in Colorado Springs." Uh-huh. OK, Ted. Sure. Did you just come up with that?

F. Scott Fitzgerald may have said there were no second acts in American lives, but Ted Haggard has to be on his third or fourth. What should he do for an encore? Let us prey....

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.